I don't shoot video - and I rarely burst more than a few shots at once and therefore never over-run my camera's buffer - so the high speeds don't really matter to me
And the CF cards don't fit in my D80

I just saw this thread (again) and like csd said the 5 year jump is really something to see.

A lot has changed over this time and things are still changing at a faster and faster rate.

The reason I came back to this thread is I am trying to find a site that has up to date testing information CF and SD memory.

I was in a situation last weekend where I had to buy some CF memory and ended up with a couple of Delkin Pro UDMA 6 8GB CF cards. The speed on the card is 450x but compared to my Transcend 300x CF card the Delkin takes at least twice as much time to write to my HD.

If memory serves me right the Transcend was very inexpensive too.

Well, that's my 2 cents on CF cards. I hope to find some current data base that has the read/write speeds of currently sold cards.

Here's another page with some tests of them using various block sizes with aligned writes. Of the UHS-1 cards tested there so far, the Sandisk cards have the fastest write speeds (even though read speed is better from some of the others like the Panasonic).

Note that Rob Galbraith did test some of the fast UDMA CF cards using that supported faster transfers a while back, including a Canon 7D. See those here (and note that the camera tests also show write speed, but the reader test is only showing read speed).

Now... I can tell you from testing both a Sandisk 30MB/Second Extreme II Memory Stick Pro HG Duo card, and a Sandisk 30MB/Second Class 10 Extreme SDHC Card in previous Sony models (for example, the A550), that the Sandisk Memory Stick Pro HG Duo card was significantly faster compared to that SDHC Card (as you'd expect, since it's also faster in card reader tests). But, that was not one of the newer UHS-1 cards (and the A77 should work better with the newer ones).

See how the Class 10 Sandisk Extreme SDHC Card tests here (maximum write speed of just over 23MB/Second, whereas a Sandisk 30MB/Second Memory Stick Pro HG Duo card tests at over 40MB/Second write speed, which is faster than rated):

Note the results using both card types in our A550 review here (the Sandisk Extreme III Memory Stick Pro HG Duo allowed more raw images in a raw before a slowdown, with faster full buffer write times compared to the Sandisk Extreme SDHC Card).

Switching to RAW with the Optical Viewfinder, I was able to capture 25 images in 5.2 seconds (4.8fps) before the camera slowed down, still capturing 87 images over 30 seconds. The camera's buffer took 7 seconds to clear with the Sandisk 8GB 30MB/Second Pro-HG Duo card.

Switching to a Sandisk 4GB 30MB/Second SDHC card, I was able to capture 14 images in 3 seconds before the camera slowed down, capturing 49 images in 30 seconds. A full buffer took approximately 11 seconds to clear with the Sandisk 4GB 30MB/Second Class 10 SDHC Card. In other words, the best performance when shooting RAW is with a Sandisk 30MB/Second Pro-HG Duo card, allowing more RAW images before the camera slows down, with faster full buffer clear times (as compared to a Sandisk 4GB 30MB/Second Class 10 SDHC Card, which tested slower than Sandisk Pro-HG Duo media in this camera model).

I have not seen any tests of the newer Sony models using a Sandisk Extreme Pro UHS-1 SDHC card yet. My guess is that they'll be just as fast or faster in the Sony A77 as the Sandisk 30MB/Second Extreme III Memory Stick Pro HG Duo cards (since both have write speeds over 40MB/Second using fast readers).

But, we'll have to wait until these cameras are tested using newer UHS-1 cards to find out (as the A77 you ordered will probably take advantage of UHS-1 transfer modes when using them, but until they're tested, we won't know if they're faster compared to the Sandisk 30MB/Second Memory Stick Pro HG Duo cards).

Just to make things more interesting, Sony is now shipping 50MB/Second Memory Stick Pro HG Duo cards. See them on the Sony Japan site here (click on an image showing the packaging, and you'll see them labeled as 50MB/Second):